How on earth did driver of speedboat that killed our son get off scot-free?

After six years of tireless campaigning for justice for their dead child, it was a crushing moment simply too much to bear.

Paul and Andrea Gallagher had invested their hearts, souls and £50,000 life savings in a fight to bring a manslaughter case against the three men they hold responsible for the death of their son, Paul Jnr.

The two-year-old died from terrible head injuries during what should have been a dream trip for the family to the Bahamas after an out-of-control speedboat ploughed across a crowded beach.

But last week, in a stuffy and crowded courtroom in the Bahamian capital of Nassau, the Gallaghers’ world collapsed.

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Heartbroken: After the judge dismissed the case Paul and Andrea Gallagher screamed in horror after a six year battle for justice for their son

Three-quarters of the way through a two-week manslaughter trial against the boat’s driver James Bain and its owners Clifford Nottage and Evangeless Williamson, Supreme Court Judge Elliot Lockhart abruptly dismissed the case against them.

He ruled there was insufficient evidence of negligence, even though the boat had been unlicensed, had no insurance and Bain had traces of marijuana in his blood – all clear breaches of Bahamian law.

The couple, from Orpington, Kent, screamed in horror as the judge brought the proceedings to an end.

Mrs Gallagher broke down and wept while her husband shouted at the three defendants and had to be ushered from the building.

“It was like a physical blow,” Andrea said yesterday. “I was stunned. I started shaking and collapsed to the floor, crying.

“The last bit of strength I had mustered up to enable me to come to the courtroom, to face them, was knocked out. I literally had no energy left to hold myself up.

“We thought it was an open and shut case. We wanted justice, but also to make the beaches of the Bahamas safer for other holidaymakers.

“Now the judge has given out a firm message – you can break Bahamian law and get away with it.”

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Tragedy: Paul was killed by an out-of-control speedboat as he played in the sand in the Bahamas six years ago

The Gallaghers were told there was no right of appeal and that the struggle that had consumed their lives since the day Paul was killed during a £10,000 ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ holiday in August 2002 had ended without a satisfactory resolution.

“‘We have come back to the Bahamas several times for inquests, police investigations and preliminary hearings,” added Andrea, 41.

“But this time we hoped we would get justice from a jury. We both found it hard to leave our two other children, Heather and Andrew, at home.

“But we felt we had to return to the place where their brother died to fight for justice to honour his memory.

“We were filled with anticipation, hope even. But as we got off the plane, memories of that holiday came flooding back to me – little Paul digging in the sand, then, after the boat hit, our baby lying on the beach with a big chunk of his skull missing – the sand red with his blood.”

Now they are left with a bitter feeling that after struggling to bring the case to court – but winning support from Tony Blair, then-Foreign Office Minister Baroness Symons and a Scotland Yard investigation – they are the victims of a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Accused: Skipper James Bain had his case dismissed despite having traces of marijuana in his blood

“We didn’t expect it at all,” said Paul, 43. “Even though I thought throughout that the judge seemed more sympathetic to the defence, we still thought the ultimate decision would be in the hands of the jury.

“Even if the jury had decided against us, we would have been able to accept it. But by ruling that there was no case to answer, the judge took that away from us.

“Now it is almost as though we have had no trial. We feel as if we have been through all this for nothing.”

The couple both gave evidence on the first day of the trial, two weeks ago. Andrea was in the witness box for two hours.

She said: “It was horrendous. The defence accused me of being a bitter woman waging a vendetta. All I could do was tell the truth – that I am a mother trying to do the right thing for her son.”

The Gallaghers realised the odds were stacked against them right from the start of the hearing when evidence that would have helped their case was ruled inadmissible.

On the last day of the prosecution case, on Thursday, defence counsel J. Henry Bostwick QC asked the judge to rule there was “no case to answer”, claiming the prosecution had shown no evidence of negligence – and that the safety of people on the beach at a private resort could not in Bahamian law be regarded as the responsibility of the boat’s driver.

The judge ruled that Mr Bostwick was correct and that, in effect, the tragedy fell into a legal black hole.

Paul said: “If Bain had been driving a car which had mounted a pavement and hit little Paul, he would have been punished.

“That boat was a powerful machine – 200 horsepower – and Bain had no skipper’s licence or insurance and was under the influence of cannabis.

“How can he not be responsible? The men we know are responsible for the death of our son have got off scot-free.”

Andrea added: “I certainly never want to set foot on that island again. But I do think our fight has been worthwhile. We may not have got the verdict we wanted, but we have achieved a hell of a lot.

“Since Paul died, new water safety laws have been brought in to make the Bahamas safer. Now we can only pray the new laws are upheld and no family will ever have to suffer the way we have.

“This has cost us everything: our life savings, our business and our peace of mind. But we felt the authorities wanted to sweep Paul’s death under the carpet to protect their tourist industry from bad publicity.

“We may not have got justice, but no one can say that we did not try our hardest for little Paul.”

NEW BRITAIN, Connecticut (AP) — A sex offender recently released from prison brazenly invaded a home, shot two women meeting for morning coffee and abducted one of them, whose body was found about 10 miles away, police said.

Leslie Williams, 31, told police that he entered the unlocked home Sunday morning looking for money and a car, but that when two women inside saw his face, he had no choice but to shoot them, according to an arrest warrant.

According to the arrest warrant, Larese offered Williams $20 and Welsh gave him her car key, but Williams ordered the two into the basement and shot Larese. The warrant does not address the shooting of Welsh.

Larese told police she pretended to be dead, then stayed in her basement for an hour to make sure the intruder had left. She went to a neighbor’s home across the street for help.

“She just told me she was shot,” Teresa Diters said. “She was all full of blood from head to toe. I was amazed.”

Police said they arrested Williams when he crashed Welsh’s car about 25 miles away in Watertown after a police chase later on Sunday.

Welsh’s body was found in a wooded area of Bristol early Monday, Sgt. Darren Pearson said. MORE>>>

Law enforcement officers found the body today of a Plaquemine woman who had been missing since Saturday morning.The body of Janaver Distefano was found in the Bunkie area about 7 a.m., according to Chief Deputy Harry Normand of the Avoyelles Parish Sheriff’s Office.An autopsy will be performed, he said.

Normand said that Donald Ray Johnson of Bunkie was arrested and accused of using Distefano’s credit card. Johnson, 23, has been booked on a count of unauthorized use of a bank access card, and is being held in jail under $100,000 bail.

Distefano was visiting a casino in Marksville on Saturday with her husband, Joseph “T-Joe” Distefano, when she went on a shopping trip and did not return.

Investigation determined that her credit card was used Saturday night at Wal-Mart and to buy gasoline.

A joint investigation is being conducted by the Avoyelles Parish Sheriff’s Office and the FBI.

http://www.libreopinion.com/members/standarteslc/race05.htmlApproximately 34 million acts were committed in the U.S. in 1992–about 94,000 crimes daily. This is a Justice Department estimate. We don’t know the exact number, because many, if not most, crimes are not reported. We do know, however, that the national crime rate-crimes per capita-has tripled over the past 30 years, and at least 71 percent of all violent crimes involve some kind of economic loss.

Distorted Statistics Prior to 1986, Hispanics were classified as a distinct and separate racial group. Not anymore. The FBI and U.S. Census Bureau no longer distinguish between Hispanics (who are actually Spanish speaking Indians for the most part) and Whites; their crimes are lumped together in one ethnic pot. The 22,354,059 Hispanics living in the U.S. do not exist, at least not in the ethnic sense when it comes to the FBI compiling criminal statistics for mainstream and news organizations. Included by the FBI as “WHITES” is not only Hispanics, but also West Asians, Jews, Middle Easterners, North Africans, Iranians, Iraquis, Libyans, Palestinians, and refugees from the former Soviet Union. The question that immediately comes to mind is: “Why would the FBI and the U.S. Census Bureau classify persons of Hispanic origin as being white?” The answer might surprise you. The FBI and the U.S. Census Bureau, along with mainstream media purposely distort criminal statistics and conveniently classify Mexican-Americans as white because they do not want the American public to know the truth–that Blacks are responsible for committing the vast majority of crimes here in the United States. For example, in 1993, there were 20,343 Americans murdered: Blacks, who compromise 12 percent of the U.S. population, committed 11,686 or a whopping 58 percent of those murders. The black murder rate was 38.8 per 100,000. Based on their murder rate in 1986, Hispanics committed an estimated 2,242 murders in 1993. This is 10.7 per 100,000. 76 percent of the U.S. is White (European-American) and they committed only 29.5 percent of the murders. On the other hand, Black and Hispanic minorities combined constitute 21 percent of the population, yet they committed a staggering 68.7 percent of the murders in the U.S. during 1993. This means, on a per capita basis, a Black person is 12.3 times as likely to commit murder as a White person. Since this information is not deemed “politically correct” and would perhaps offend the black segment of society, it is offset by falsely inflating the per capita basis for whites by backhandedly including Hispanics and other ethnic groups.

Here are some more shocking statistics:

More than 1,600 Whites are murdered by Blacks each year.

Blacks murder Whites at 18 times the rate Whites murder Blacks.

About 1 million Whites were murdered, robbed, assaulted, or raped by Blacks in 1992.

In the last 30 years, 170 million violent and nonviolent crimes were committed by Blacks against Whites in the U.S.

Blacks under 18 are more than 12 times more likely to be arrested for murder than Whites the same age.

Some 90% of the victims of race crimes are Whites.

Blacks commit 7.5 times more violent interracial crimes than Whites, although they comprise only one-seventh of the White population.

On a per-capita basis, blacks commit 50 times more violent crimes than Whites.

Some 27 million nonviolent crimes were committed in the U.S. in 1992 alone. 31% of the robberies involved Black offenders and White victims; only 2% involved White offenders and Black victims.

1.3 million of the 6.6 million violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year are interracial.

Between 1964 and 1994, more than 45,000 people were killed in interracial murders in the U.S., compared to 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam and 38,000 killed in Korea.

The above stats were collected by an Australian reporter, Neil Sheehan, who dug out half-concealed U.S. crime figures for an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (May 2, 1995). The contents of his article, he commented, could not possibly be published or discussed in the U.S. mainstream media. One wonders how many Whites have to be killed by Blacks before the N.Y. Times and Dan Rather break the conspiratorial silence about the number of White casualties in the guerrilla war being waged against them by Blacks. Paved With Good Intentions, a book by Jared Taylor, also studies crime statistics by race. It must be stressed that Blacks make up only 12% of the population according to the 1990 U.S. census (and Black males about 6%), but they commit a vastly disproportionate number of violent crime. Mr. Taylor reveals: 1) 58% of all arrests for weapons violations are Blacks. 2) 46% of all arrests for violent crimes are Blacks. 3) 73% of all “justified self-defense” killings are committed by Blacks. 4) 60.5% of all Blacks are armed with some type of weapon at all times. 5) 98% of all youths arrested for gun fights in Atlanta are Blacks.

In 1989, the FBI reported the following:

A) Blacks commit 8 times more assaults than Whites. B) Blacks commit 9 times more rapes than Whites. C) Blacks commit 14 times more murders than Whites. D) Blacks commit 19 times more armed robberies. E) Black neighborhoods are 35 times more violent than White neighborhoods. F) There were 629,000 interracial attacks committed in 1985 (the last year the FBI “chose” to report this information). Some nine out of every ten were committed by Blacks against Whites. G. Black males (6% of the population) make up 46% of the nation’s prison population.

It can be seen that in only one category of crimes, driving under the influence, are Blacks actually underrepresented, and even this is only by one percent. Perhaps this statistic can best be explained by the fact that Blacks own fewer cars than do Whites percentage-wise. It can further be seen that overall, Blacks are committing 2 1/2 times the amount of crimes percentage-wise as their population in America and as far as violent crimes are concerned, they are committing almost four times as much as their population percentage-wise. As far as murders go, Blacks are committing almost five times as many as their population percentage-wise. Why isn’t this ever reported on the news? Furthermore, it must be pointed out once again that many crimes go unsolved or are unreported, particularly those involving random acts. Therefore, the number of crimes that Blacks and Hispanics are committing may actually be much higher.